HeavyMusicGuide has officially hit version 1.0. After months of building, breaking, and rebuilding, the catalog now stands at over 540 bands, with a discography, encyclopedia, community reviews, and discovery tools all interlocking. If you've just landed here for the first time, the homepage can look like a lot — let this be your field guide.

What this site actually is

Three things in one:

  1. A curated metal catalog. Each band gets a dedicated page with bio, discography, tags, country, related artists, and streaming links to Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, and YouTube. Editorial focus on Norwegian heavy music with deep coverage of Scandinavian black, doom, sludge, and the underground — but extending outward to bands from anywhere worth covering.
  2. A community-driven review platform. Logged-in members can rate albums 1–10, write 200–3000-character reviews, and have them moderated and published with structured data so Google shows ⭐ stars next to the album in search results.
  3. A reader-friendly blog and forum for longer-form thinking, news, interviews, and discussion.

The short pitch: it's Metal-Archives meets Rate Your Music meets a small-town record-store knowledge base — built by one Norwegian metal fan instead of a corporation.

Your 60-second tour

If you only have a minute, here's the map:

  • Front page — Friday Metal Drop (Fridays + Saturdays), latest blog articles, "From the Saga" feed of recent encyclopedia updates, the genre tag-cloud, and the main playlist table with filters.
  • Band pages at /band/{slug} — the deepest experience on the site.
  • Musicians catalog at /musicians — cross-band lineups, who-played-where.
  • Blog at /blog/blogg.php — news, reviews, interviews.
  • Forum at /forum/index.php — community discussion.

Browsing and discovery

The main playlist (front page)

The big table at the bottom of the homepage is the discovery engine. Filter by:

  • Genre — broad buckets (Black Metal, Doom, Sludge, Power Metal…)
  • Country — origin of the band
  • Decade — when the song was released
  • Tag — finer sub-genre buckets (Atmospheric Black, Speed Metal, Brutal Death…)
  • Alphabet — letter ranges A-Å for jumping to a section

Each row in the table has streaming-icons taking you straight to Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, or YouTube. You can also switch to Band wall grid mode via the toggle next to the Playlist header — same data, more visual.

Tag-cloud

Above the playlist sits the genre tag-cloud — 50 most-used sub-genre tags, sized by popularity. Click any tag to see all bands with that tag. On mobile it's collapsed by default — tap the "Browse by sjanger" header to expand.

Quick search

Anywhere in the site, the search-icon in the navigation gives you a full-text search across band names, song titles, and albums. Designed to handle partial typing — searching dark finds Dark Tranquillity.

From the Saga

A dedicated feed on the front page showing the most recent additions to the Norwegian encyclopedia — new releases logged, videos added, reviews approved. Updates every 5 minutes; updates from older entries get an UPD badge so you can tell what's new versus what's been revised.

Friday Metal Drop

Every Friday and Saturday, the front page reorganises to feature that week's new releases. Curated heavy music dropping that week, grouped by sub-genre. The rest of the week the homepage goes back to its standard layout.

The band page

This is where the depth lives. Each band's page (/band/{slug}) shows:

  • Header — name, country flag, primary genre tag, member-count, founding year
  • Bio — editorial or user-contributed text about the band's history and sound
  • Related-you-may-like — algorithmically and editorially suggested similar bands
  • Discography — every release we have logged, with cover art, year, label, and a like-button. Each release card expands to show:
    • Tracklist (collapsible)
    • Line-up (collapsible — members, guests, session musicians)
    • 1-10 community-reviews aggregate with histogram + top 3 reviews
    • "Write a review" or "Sign in to review" button
  • Videos — music videos and live performances, embedded
  • Streaming row — direct links to the band on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, YouTube, plus their official site, Bandcamp, and Metal-Archives

Each album also has a quick thumbs-up like — visible to everyone, no login required. Logged-in members additionally get a personal 1-5 star rating for their own listening history.

Becoming an active member

You can browse everything without an account. To contribute, register via the forum:

  1. Register at the forum signup page.
  2. Confirm your email — there's an activation link.
  3. You're in. You can now write reviews, rate albums (1-5 stars), comment on blog posts, like posts, vote in polls, and post in the forum.

Writing an album review

Each release card on a band page for Norwegian bands shows a Write a review button (only for albums, EPs, and live albums — singles and demos are intentionally excluded to keep the focus on full releases). Reviews require:

  • A rating from 1 to 10 (no half-stars)
  • Between 200 and 3000 characters
  • Email-verified account
  • Max 3 new reviews per 24 hours per user (edits don't count)

Markdown-light is supported: **bold**, *italic*, [link text](https://example.com), and blank lines for new paragraphs. A live counter helps you stay inside the character range, and a Preview tab shows how it'll look.

Submissions go to admin moderation. Once approved, your review appears under the album with your username, rating, and date — and contributes to the aggregate score. The Schema.org markup means Google may show those rating stars next to the album in search results.

Editing or deleting your own review

Click "Write a review" again on an album you've already reviewed — the form pre-fills with your previous text. An edit resets the status to waiting for approval; the admin re-checks before re-publishing. The "Delete your review" button on the edit page hides your review from public view. The original text stays in our database for audit, but no one sees it anymore — including you. An admin can restore it if asked.

The musicians encyclopedia

Beyond bands, we track people. The musicians catalog at /musicians lists everyone who has played on a release we've documented. Each musician has their own page (/musician/{slug}) showing:

  • Stage name, real name, aliases
  • Country of origin
  • Bands they've been in (current and past)
  • Releases they've played on, with their role (guitar, vocals, session, etc.)
  • Photo if available

This is where cross-band linkage lives. If you're reading about an Abbath release and see that the drummer was also in Mayhem, the musician page lets you jump straight to that lineage.

The blog and the forum

The blog is for editorial content — news, deep-dive reviews, interviews, scene write-ups. Filter by category (News, Reviews, Interview) or click tags to find related articles. Each post supports likes and threaded comments.

The forum is for conversation. Threaded discussions across boards: Black Metal, Doom & Stoner, News & Releases, General, Site Feedback. Standard forum mechanics — quoted replies, signatures, avatars, private messages.

Three themes

Use the theme switcher (in the top navigation) to switch between:

  • Dark — the default. Black background, orange accent. Low-light reading.
  • Light — beige/cream parchment with dark olive text and gold accent. Easier on bright-room screens.
  • Berserker — cyberpunk-Norse. Dark cyan-black with bright cyan accent. Made for the Friday Drop crowd.

The site remembers your choice via a cookie. All themes use the same content — only the visual treatment changes.

Behind the scenes

HeavyMusicGuide is built and run by one person (with help from few great friends) — Norwegian, single developer, full manual deploy, no external CMS, no analytics that track you across sites. The stack is plain PHP, MariaDB, vanilla JavaScript, and custom CSS. No tracking pixels, no third-party data brokers, no "anonymous" telemetry. The only third parties involved are the streaming platforms whose icons you click through to.

What's next

Version 1.0 doesn't mean we're done — it means the foundation is solid. Coming up:

  • Helpful-voting on reviews — thumbs-up/down so the best reviews surface first
  • Reviewer profiles with badges (Veteran Reviewer, Genre Evangelist, Harsh Critic)
  • "For fans of"-tags on reviews — letting reviewers suggest similar bands per album
  • Pre-order links on upcoming releases, directing traffic to Bandcamp and labels
  • Last.fm integration for showing what the site owner is currently listening to

If there's something you want to see — or something broken — the forum has a Site Feedback board. We read everything.

Quick reference card

Bookmark these:

Now: pick a band you love. Click into them. Write your first review. See how it feels.

Welcome to HeavyMusicGuide 1.0.